New Faculty: Dana Miller-Cotto

Why Berkeley?

Something that’s always struck me about Berkeley is folks’ comfort with social justice initiatives and how, for me, it always seemed like Berkeley didn't just talk about inequality — they actually had things happening to address inequality.

The initiative or the actual acknowledgment and then actual steps to do something is really attractive to me. There are a lot of conversations across the country about community practice partnerships. These are things that have been happening at Berkeley for a long time. They just didn't call it that yet.

And so for me, as an academic and as a human, I never wanted my work alone to be the only thing that I was good at or did. I really care a lot more about what I can do for the surrounding community.

And it feels like Berkeley is the right place to do that.

Tell us why you chose the quotation from Stephen Jay Gould on your personal website. It reads: “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”

When I was a grad student, my advisor and I worked to build this model called the opportunity propensity model. Essentially, it suggests that in order to understand any developmental outcome, we were particularly interested in academic achievement, three conditions must be met.

The first condition is that children have to have access to these abundant, high quality, opportunities. And they have to have the propensity to take advantage of those opportunities; not necessarily motivation but prior knowledge, skills, gross motor, fine motor skills – things that allow you to actually be able to take advantage of opportunities.

But the thing about opportunities and propensities is that the predictors of those are race and gender and socioeconomic status.

And so the real difference between children, when we think about inequity in early childhood, is whether the kids’ have the opportunity.

There’s a lot of interest in how we get kids to be high performers in STEM or reading or whatever your outcome of interest is. But I think at the end of the day, all kids are brilliant.

But the difference is, were they given the opportunity to demonstrate that brilliance?

As a short story, I think about all the times that I've ridden a taxi or a Lyft anywhere, and you meet people from all walks of life. You meet people who are recent arrivals to the United States, maybe they were a pharmacist in their country or a lawyer. Or you meet people who just didn't have the opportunity to go to college.

And those conversations to me don’t differ very much from the conversations I have with super, highly, formally educated folks. The difference between me and someone who didn't go to college is the opportunity to have gone. They’re still able to participate in really intellectual conversations. Everything comes back to these opportunities.

Executive function has become a bit of a buzzword and is often associated with time management and organizational skills. How does executive function fit into your research?

In grad school, my advisor and I started looking at these secondary data sets to see what are these early predictors of math achievement at school entry, or even first or second grade. What we kept finding was that executive function, or self-regulation more broadly, was a strong predictor of early math. And it annoyed me because it felt like, what is executive function doing for a kid? They’re correlated, but why? And the more work I did, the more I realized so much of the work was correlational. And then people were making, in my mind, these really big claims about what we should do about executive function.

Should we train kids on it? Should we be dumping money into afterschool programs that are going to grow kids’ executive function skills? I just thought they seemed like strange conclusions to make based on correlations.

And it was almost like my story of rebellion – I needed to know why these things are related first.

Please share more about the potential role of varying culture and cultural values in executive function and assessments.

The more research I did, the more I was struggling with the way different fields defined executive function or even the way that it was administered, and even some of the assumptions we made about why children living in poverty, primarily children of color, demonstrate lower executive function performance on these typical tasks.

But I think that when we make assumptions or conclusions that executive function is stable despite contexts or across who’s doing the assessment, I think that's the part that rubbed me the wrong way.

So the idea that if an adult, a novel adult, is doing an assessment with a small child, then that’s adding a layer of noise to this assessment, right? If you are regulating or paying attention, some of the distraction could be that this person in front of you is not someone you’ve seen before.

I remember starting kindergarten. I went to a predominantly Black elementary school. The first time I saw someone with blond hair, I was like, ‘this is very fascinating.’ And I was so fascinated I couldn't even pay attention. It was like, ‘whoa, I've only ever seen it on TV.’

And so if that’s my experience, even outside of being part of an assessment, then what is every other kid’s experience being part of these studies?

Then the idea that in some cultures even sitting down with an adult and engaging in a task would be really strange because in some cultures, kids don't talk to adults when engaging in activities, they only talk to other kids, and only adults talk to each other. Then we’re adding another layer of noise that we should be accounting for. We may be devaluing tasks in context that may be more informative of what kids can do.

What’s an example of what we are devaluing?

In my mind, there’s a ton of things I could think about in the inner city, like double Dutch.

This is a very classic urban jump rope game that children play. It requires a lot of executive function, but I doubt I would ever see anybody using that as an assessment of executive function.

One of the things in double Dutch is you have to time it. The two ropes are spinning at the same time, you have to decide when’s a good time for you to jump in. So that’s requiring some inhibition – you inhibit the desire to jump in.

And then on top of that you almost have to, for lack of a better word, fake it. You’re almost like faking when you’re going to jump in because that kind of adds a little bit to the experience of the people watching, right? So they may think you’re getting ready to jump in, but nope, you’re not going to jump in yet.

And then when you’re actually in, being able to align your jumps with the pace of the rope. Sometimes even the person holding the rope isn’t aware that you’re trying to align with it, or may actually be trying to turn the ropes in a way that makes it more difficult for you to do the jump.

There’s a lot of self-regulation and inhibition – executive function – in there that we don’t think of when we’re playing double Dutch, but it’s there.

What do you hope is the impact of your work?

I think that in psychology I’d say we have done an interesting job of problematizing Black and brown children as a problem to be solved. So we’re identifying things that we think that they do that are odd and saying, `well, that's odd, we should change that behavior.’

An example is the multi-generational household. So many people have interpreted that as we should teach these families not to have overcrowded households without acknowledging that so many of us have multi-generational households as a buffer or as a way of thriving in the U.S., where there are very few social programs to help them thrive.

If you don't have a babysitter, okay, grandma and grandpa or auntie will help with this. Or I need help with my algebra homework, uncle is really good at this.

So instead of looking at it in a negative way that there are ten people in their house, it’s ‘these people have ten people to help with literally every aspect of child rearing that you can think of.’

I hope that one of the things my work does is really shift those interpretations about Black and brown families.

My hope is that my lab and our collaborations grow in a way where we can actually help people make sense of what this information means, and help schools and families interpret the information so they can help their children. It’s really about the question of, how do we support communities better?